Chapter 1 Introduction

All communicators, regardless of interest, discipline or medium, need to understand numbers to do their jobs effectively. More and more of society is being transformed by data as our lives are increasingly stored in databases. If you can’t understand data and the basic math that you’ll use regularly on the job, you are at the mercy of people who can.

This module is designed to solve a particular problem: How do you get basic data journalism into a beginning reporting class that many feel is packed as it is? My answer is to combine the basic math for reporters with instructions on how to apply those concepts in a spreadsheet using real data, all aimed at generating real story ideas. This document will show:

  • Basic math concepts and how to calculate them by hand.
  • How to apply those basic math concepts to a spreadsheet of data.
  • How to turn basic math + a spreadsheet of data into a story idea.

Contained in this repository are the datasets used to illustrate the concepts. They are kept here in .csv format, so you can use Excel or Google Spreadsheets to do the same analysis. The spreadsheet formulas and concepts will work on any of those three software platforms.

Where to get data for these exercises

All of the data for this set of exercises is in this zip file. It is public data. You are free to use it as you want.